


Heart and Stomach

by a_verysmallviolet



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, POV Second Person, the many faces of power, very brief mention of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 22:23:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2126724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_verysmallviolet/pseuds/a_verysmallviolet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eska is her father's daughter and her mother's child to the core.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart and Stomach

It is a clear winter morning the day Master Kaskae commits treason.

“I will not obey your father,” he says, clasping his hands behind his back and looking down his high-bridged nose at you. “Tell your father I will not teach the arts of martial waterbending to a female child.”

You look up at him in silence. In your mind you are recalling last night’s summons to your mother’s chamber, how she had risen from her seat with a fountain’s graceful elegance and beckoned you closer. Like an obedient child, you had complied – until you saw the blue-green beads in her hand, the pots of kohl on the table, and stopped short.

“I’m not wearing those,” you had said. “Jade beads and kohl are for girls. They’re weak. I want silver beads like Father wears.”

Your mother had knelt to meet your eyes then, cupping your face between her cool palms.

“My child,” she had said to you. “Never let anyone tell you that to be a woman is to be weak.”

Her hands are soft, her robes perfumed, and her eyes bluer, larger, rimmed with longer and darker lashes than your father’s, but they hold – no, _command_ – your attention as sternly as his do. And, as you look back into her eyes, you understand why.

Your father is like the moon, stern and remote, reliable and yet incomprehensible in all his actions. Your father is the moon, but your mother is the sea. Her skin is shining, her eyes lovely and many-hued, but anyone who looks at that and looks no further is a fool. If need be, your mother could drown nations. Not despite her beauty, not because of her beauty, but with it as naturally as her beating heart and swelling lungs.

Power is power. Your father has it. Your mother has it. You are their daughter. You will have it too.

So it is with green beads in your hair and kohl around your eyes (eyes like your father’s, kohl like your mother’s), it is as a princess of the north that you lock eyes with the waterbending master and stare him down.

He looks away first.

From that day on no one ever questions your right to train alongside your brother. Indeed, it is not until you yourself are sitting on your throne years later that you begin to wonder why your father had ordered it so. Your father the conservative, the traditionalist, the upholder and preserver of the old ways: why would he order that a daughter be taught to fight?

You ponder that question for days, on the throne and at table, lying beneath your silver furs at night and staring at the ceiling. At last it comes to you. Your father had not seen you as a daughter, but his daughter. Before you were a female and inferior, you were his flesh and blood: _royal_ flesh and blood. It was a chief’s blood that stained your thighs every moon, a chief’s heart that beat between your narrow breasts. You, in all your body and mind, were made to rule. Your father had seen that where others saw only a girl, and helped you teach the world otherwise.

You do not cry, looking out at the frozen fountain where he used to sit and dandle you on his knee. You do not weep and wish for his hand on your shoulder again. But you do begin to forgive him.


End file.
